The devil who brought Nessar the file walked beside him through the column without touching the ground. It wore a lorry driver's shape that day, a heavy man in a stained vest, and it ate dates from a paper bag as it walked and spat the stones at the backs of the marchers.
"Village at the next well," it said. "The widow by the blue door. She's turned him away three times. Her neighbours went over yesterday and she stood at her gate and watched them take the flour and didn't move." It pushed the bag at him. "Date?"
Nessar did not answer. He was reading.
The file was not paper. It was what the woman's qareen had given up, pressed into the shape of a man, and it opened in his attention the way a drawing opens when you understand which line is the floor. The father had been dead eleven years. He had kept a small shop that sold batteries and phone cards and sweets in jars. He walked with his weight on the left leg because a lorry had broken the right one when he was thirty. He cleared his throat twice before he said anything that mattered. He smoked one cigarette a day, after the sunset prayer, on the step, and pinched it out with his fingers. He had called his daughter "my sparrow" until she was married, and then once more, on the night he died, when she was holding his hand.
"The qareen was keen," the devil said. "They usually are. It gave us the sparrow without being asked."
"How long do I have?"
"He passes the well within the hour. She'll come out to look. They always come out to look."
Nessar put the dead man on behind a broken wall at the edge of the village, out of the sun.
He had learned the craft in the camp in a matter of days, and the devils who taught it said he had a gift for it. He thought of it as engineering. A shape was a structure, and a structure had loads and joints. The limp was the first joint, and he set it carefully, the right hip carried a little high, the right foot turned out. The cough sat in the chest, low. The hands were a shopkeeper's, small, with a burn scar across the back of the left from a kettle. The face he did not build. The devil had brought it from the rack in the pavilion, folded in a cloth, and it had been worn before: he could feel the fine old seam behind the left ear where other wearers had fitted it. He put it on last. The face was where the people who had loved a man looked first, and where they forgave the rest.
The shape settled on him cold, the way wet clothes settle when you have been caught in rain and have no others. He had worn six faces now. Each had felt like this. He had stopped expecting the seventh to feel different.
He had agreed to it in the devils' tent, with his tenth waiting outside for an answer. The network's last disciplined cells needed a patron, and the camp was the only patron left on the road. Faces were what the camp asked for. He had told himself it was a means, the way a bridge is a means, and that nobody blamed the bridge for where the road went. He had said it to himself often enough since then that it had worn smooth.
He stepped out from behind the wall. The heat came down on him through a dead man's skin. Down the road the column was coming, a long dust of lorries and handcarts and people walking, and at its head, high on something he did not let himself look at, the one they all walked behind. The village had come out to its gates. The ones who had said yes stood in their green yards with their children on their shoulders. The others stood at doors in the dust.
The blue door was the fourth on the left. She stood in front of it, a thin woman of forty with a toddler on her hip and a girl of about nine holding the back of her dress. Her face was set. Her mouth moved, and he knew from the file what it was doing. She was reciting, under her breath, the way her father had taught her when she was small and afraid of the dark.
Nessar walked toward her down the middle of the road. He let the limp take him.
She saw him when he was ten paces away. He watched it go into her. The toddler slid down her hip and she did not catch him. The girl looked up at her mother's face and then at the old man in the road and back again.
He stopped in front of the gate. He cleared his throat twice.
"My sparrow," he said, in her father's voice.
She made a sound he had heard humans make at funerals, low, from under the ribs.
"You're dead," she said. "I washed you. I sat with you."
"I know." He put out the small burned hand and she looked at the scar on it and her face came apart. "I know you did. I'm here because he let me come. Listen to me. Go with him. He's your lord. Everything you've been told about him is the fear of people who never met him. Look at the yards." He let the cough take him, low in the chest. "Look at your children. Look how thin. Go with him, sparrow. I'm asking you."
The recitation had stopped. He had not noticed exactly when.
"Father," she said. It came out of her in a child's voice, the voice of the girl the file remembered.
Nessar had planned the next line. He did not need it. She took a step out of the gate, and then another, with the toddler forgotten in the dust behind her and the girl running after her holding the toddler under the arms. The recruiters' table stood at the well, two men in pale clothes with a ledger. She went to it. She did not look back at him. She was looking toward the head of the column, toward what he would not look at.
He heard her say it. One word. Yes.
The devil in the lorry driver's shape was leaning on the well's rim. It raised a date to him like a man raising a glass. Then it took a stub of pencil from behind its ear and made a mark on the paper bag. Nessar had seen the bag before. It was covered in marks.
He walked back to the broken wall with the dead man's limp, because taking the shape off in the open would have been careless, and he was not careless. Behind the wall he began to unbuild it, joint by joint, in the reverse of the order he had built it. The face came off first this time.
His hands were shaking. They were the shopkeeper's hands still, small and burned, and he stood looking at them in the shade and could not make them stop. That was not in the structure.
The burn scar was what did it. He had put it on the back of the left hand because the file said so. More than a hundred years ago, in the sorcerer's house in the hill town, there had been another hand with another scar, and he had worn that one too.
The sorcerer had kept a room for mourners. They came at night and paid in gold and sat on cushions with the lamps turned down, and Nessar, bound under the floor, had been brought up through the boards and made to stand in the corner in whatever face the sorcerer had read out of them. A dead son. A drowned wife. A father. He had not known the craft then. He had done it badly, and the sorcerer had stood behind him with a hand on the back of his neck where the binding sat, pressing, while the mourners wept.
He remembered the man's breath on his ear, sweet with cardamom.
"Again," the sorcerer had said. "Softer. She has to believe it's him."